Memory Pack Rat

This photograph of me and you gauze red shirt and winter sunned on our way to New York City to traipse the town and eat Chinese is still on my refrigerator door. Twelve years passed, maybe more. Somehow our smiles with open mouths to catch the air of frozen thoughts in camera eyes and shutters and clicks self-set on the roof of your car, still grab me in passing and make me look. That day, we listened to Ben on the radio. Laughed like goofs to our self-made bootlegs of concerts where we stood three feet from the stage. Me, being asked to play his piano. Him - with birthing shoulders, so small, so slight. It's dizzying really. We escaped time, life, history just to step our own feet in that city smell, that breath of sidewalk vendors, almost Spring tulips, stone statues and salty sand from the last snowfall of winter. All this time, and this one photograph, held with a tacky magnet on my refrigerator holds a memory, and a memory, and a memory again. - and people wonder why I am a pack rat...